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THE BLOKE’ on DVD Speech Given by Graham Shirley, 12 May 2009

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THE BLOKE’ on DVD Speech Given by Graham Shirley, 12 May 2009 LAUNCHING ‘THE BLOKE’ ON DVD Speech given by Graham Shirley, 12 May 2009 Within walking distance of the Powerhouse Museum are the old Walsh Bay Wharves – places like Pier One, now a hotel and function centre, and the Wharf Theatre. Over the road nestles the up-market Sydney Theatre Company. Walsh Bay, like Pyrmont, is now associated increasingly with prestige businesses and up-market living. Back in the 1950s it was a set of rough-and-tumble wharves, a place of heavy, backbreaking manual labour of men who used cranes, nets, grappling hooks and their bent backs to unload crates, sacks, 44-gallon drums and wheat whose dust could trigger silicosis. In the 1950s there was no Australian feature industry to speak of, and yet we produced many documentaries. Among the documentary filmmakers were Keith Gow, Norma Disher and Jock Levy of the Waterside Workers’ Film Unit. From the start to the finish of the decade, the ‘wharfies’ film unit’ made a dozen remarkable, semi-dramatised documentaries that recorded the working and pay conditions of wharfies, the building workers, coal-miners and other unionists they knew. One day, Gow, Disher and Levy met a man in his 80s very different to the usual people on the wharves. Tall and with a resonant theatrical voice, this man was impeccably dressed, complete with a three-piece brown suit with a matching homburg, overcoat and amber-handled umbrella. This man was working as a watchman, sometimes during the day, sometimes at night. As he roamed the wharves by night, he used his torch to scare rats out of a burst sack of grain, or hurry along a drunk who’d just hurled a brick through a window. This watchman’s name was Raymond Longford. Keith Gow knew who Raymond Longford was, and was aware that he’d been an Australian feature filmmaker 50 years before. He tried to draw Longford into talking about his early days of filmmaking, including The Sentimental Bloke that Longford and 2 his partner Lottie Lyell had made near other wharves two harbour inlets to the east – in the working-class suburb of Woolloomooloo. But that day Longford just didn’t want to talk about the past. Because by the 1950s, Lottie Lyell and Arthur Tauchert, two of the people who had contributed most to The Sentimental Bloke had been dead for a quarter of a century, and Lottie Lyell had meant an enormous amount to Longford – enough to make him cry as he talked about her to Lacey Percival, a veteran cameraman who also bumped into him on the wharves in the ‘50s. There was also one night in 1955 when the Sydney Film Festival ran a print of the recently rediscovered The Sentimental Bloke at the University of Sydney, no more than five kilometres from the Walsh Bay wharves. The audience lapped up the film and hailed it as an Australian classic and major rediscovery. But there was something or someone missing, and that someone was Raymond Longford. The night that SFF unspooled his film for the first time in 30 years, Longford may well, as usual, have been doing his lonely rounds on the wharves. When a Sunday Telegraph reporter contacted Longford and the festival after the screening, Longford said he hadn’t known about the screening, and the festival chairman said that the festival organisers hadn’t known Longford was still alive. Raymond Longford now had four years of rediscovery and acclaim before his death in 1959. But from the time of his filmmaking partner Lottie Lyell’s death from tuberculosis in 1925 through to 1955, Longford had been very much a man in the shadows, unable to sustain the creative spark that his work with Lyell had generated. He was unable to adapt from silent to sound filmmaking, and he had his final film work as a bit player or extra in other people’s films in the 1930s. In the 1950s, The Sentimental Bloke was lucky to survive at all. Not only had 90 per cent of Australia’s silent film output been lost through neglect or deliberate destruction, but there were a couple of nitrate film vault fires in Melbourne – vaults run by the old federal government Cinema Branch who at that time were responsible for keeping films for the nucleus of a national film archive. In 1952, out of the second major Cinema Branch fire 3 in a decade, rare survivors were a set of cans containing a tinted nitrate 35mm print of The Sentimental Bloke . The National Library, who by the 1950s were running what did ultimately become the National Film and Sound Archive, arranged for the Bloke to be sent to Automatic Film Laboratories at Moore Park, Sydney. As part of preparing the film to be copied, this nitrate print needed to be respliced. The 15-year-old who did the resplicing was called Anthony, or Tony, Buckley. The National Library at that time had a policy of not preserving films in their original 35 millimetre gauge, but reduction copying them to 16 millimetre – not only to save money and make their copying money go further, but also to allow 16 millimetre distribution of key films to film societies, schools and other borrowers from what is now the NFSA’s Non-Theatrical Loans Collection. It was a 16 millimetre black-and-white print that the Sydney Film Festival ran in 1955, and it was mostly in 16 millimetre black-and-white form that several generations of new audiences saw The Sentimental Bloke for another fifty years. In the meantime, all but one reel of the 35 mm print of Bloke that had survived the Cinema Branch fire, disappeared. It’s possible, as Ray Edmondson writes in the monograph accompanying today’s DVD, that these reels were unthinkingly sent to a Canberra tip as part of a nitrate vault clean-out in 1968. The Sentimental Bloke was one of around 30 narrative films that Raymond Longford directed, most of them feature-length, or running an hour or more. Today it’s one of only a few survivors of Longford’s output. But what a film The Bloke was, and is. It was a radical departure for Longford and Lyell, most of whose preceding films had been quality melodramas showing the influence of the stage. With Bloke , Longford and Lottie Lyell made a naturalistic comedy that succeeded so well – and continues to work today – because it distilled the day-to-day lives, routines and outlooks of the type of people they’d mixed with most of their lives. Longford had grown up in the Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo suburbs that are part of the character of Bloke , and in filming, he moved the story’s locale away from the Melbourne that was the setting of the CJ Dennis narrative poem from which the film was adapted. 4 Longford was the most assured and successful Australian silent-era filmmaker. He was also the one most concerned with evolving and developing a distinctive Australian screen character. The Sentimental Bloke as a film was a huge hit with Australian audiences, and during hearings for a Royal Commission into the Australian Film Industry in 1927 was invariably recognised as the supreme achievement of Australian filmmaking’s silent era. I’ve mentioned Lottie Lyell here and there. Now who was she, and what was her contribution to Longford’s films, and his life? For a start, she appeared in 25 of Longford’s films, 18 of them in starring roles. Increasingly, and certainly by the mid- 1910s, she was Longford’s co-producer, co-writer or sole writer, his film editor, his production designer, and, mostly uncredited, his co-director or at least co-directorial consultant. She received her only on-screen credit as Longford’s co-director on The Blue Mountains Mystery in 1921, and yet there are accounts, both in newspaper and magazine articles of the day and later oral histories, that she had a definite say in how the Longford- Lyell films were directed. A key clue to Lyell’s and Longford’s approach to filmmaking comes from the fact that Lyell’s theatrical training had included an emphasis on what was referred to as ‘the natural method’, and there’s realism and believability aplenty in The Bloke . In 1920, Longford told a journalist: ‘The true art of acting is not to act. … That’s what I have drummed into the ears of my characters, and I think it has had its effect in the naturalness of my pictures. It is the little things that count, the little human touches that build up a big production, and to these I have given the most thought.’ In time, Lyell and Longford became partners in life as well as in their filmmaking. But her death in 1925 was something from which Longford never completely recovered. Though Longford and Lyell never married, Longford’s second wife Emilie saw to it that Longford was buried in the same grave plot as Lyell after his death in 1959. When asked by journalist Peter Hastings in 1955 why he hadn’t seen The Sentimental Bloke for three decades, Longford replied that the people associated with the Bloke had loved Lyell so 5 much, ‘that for years after she died, we didn’t want to see the film. It would have brought back too many memories.’ Another reason that Longford gave for not seeing the film for three decades was that it simply hadn’t been shown. Since the 1950s, The Sentimental Bloke has attracted far more audiences thanks to film festivals and film societies running 16 millimetre and other formats, than it ever found during Longford’s lifetime.
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